why my memory consumption on the server is only 8.5 MB with an .sps file with 215 MB?

the point is that:

attributes are mmaped into memory. mmap is a way of working with files when they’re mapped into memory which allows to then work with them in memory and let OS read and write it to disk when needed.

OS decides itself whether the file (in your case .sps) at any moment is fully or partly in memory since other processes may need the memory too. That’s why the memory consumption may be lower then .spa + .sps + .spm + .spi

mlock (support available in *nix) allows to make sure the attributes are always in memory

So if you don’t suffer from higher query response time due to mlock=0 then just take the above into account. Otherwise I would suggest to migrate to Linux. Let me also remind that the product has commercial support, consulting and development https://manticoresearch.com/professional-support/ and if it’s critical for your business feel free to contact us and we’ll think of a better solution together.

Thanks for letting us know. The point is that very little %% of users run Manticore (or Sphinx) under Windows Server in production. So it’s just a matter of goals and priorities. We will of course prioritize looking into this issue in future, but unfortunately right now we cannot afford working on that since we have other priorities: issues from our support clients, other features that most users need (e.g. replication and Manticore v3). Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying Windows users and their issues are not important for us. It’s just that we won’t be able to run the business successfully if we do less priority things first. We’re a small company and have to choose how we spend the resources.
As I already said for those whose business suffers from any issues we have a commercial support. We’re always working on our clients’ issues and feature requests first.